The graduate student experience at McGill

Life beyond books and papers

PhD Desautels vs. Red Med

Starting this year, the Desautels Doctoral Student Society (DDSS – Faculty of Management), has decided to will help in the organization and the funding of Intramural Sports. Their goals are threefold: “(1) to increase the feeling of kinship between PhD students, (2) to have fun and purify our bodies and mind, and (3) to improve the visibility of the Desautels Doctoral Student Society (DDSS), as well as the PhD Program inside McGill University.”

And as if I didn’t have enough activities for the semester, I decided to join the volleyball team!

Perhaps it’s due to the overwhelming number of activities we have, perhaps it’s because grad students are not too much into sports, but anyway, we were able to only form one team for this semester. Fortunately for me this team was the volleyball one.

We managed to squeeze a couple of practices into our busy schedules with two main goals in mind: get to know each other, and see if we could remember how to hit the ball. For that we went to the Tomlinson Fieldhouse during the Drop-in Recreation hours.

This week we had our opening match of the season, and it was great! Mostly due to the growing team spirit and the excitement of exercising something else than our brains.

It wasn’t an easy game for us. We had too much “experience” on our side… Two of our players were already injured before even the league started. And as for the match, as somebody put it, we were the “30-something men against the 20-something boys”.

But we fought. One of the injured players was on court nonetheless and managed to play for one set. Little by little, we improved our communication while playing (although there is probably some room for improvement here…). Overall, we weren’t so bad as we’d thought.

At the end of the day, the final score read 25-16, 25-21 for the Red Men. But that didn’t matter much for this first game… We’ll come back stronger next week!